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Although I often avoid taking summer courses, enrolling in ENGL 301 this summer was highly beneficial, to say the least. There are a number of English classes at UBC that have enhanced my writing, reading, and analytical competencies, but I believe that this technical writing course has greatly impacted my approach to writing.

My learning went far beyond the basics of composing business documents: for example, being introduced to the You-Attitude writing technique taught me the importance of always keeping the reader in mind and since learning it, I have become more conscious of how I communicate and deliver information. I particularly found the peer reviews to be helpful because we were encouraged to give constructive feedback using a friendly and respectful tone. The peer reviews were always an insightful exercise that highlighted the avoidance of the negative and imperatives, and I looked forward to them as I enjoy reading other people’s work.

Each assignment in this class has contributed to improving my technical writing skills in one way or another—specifically the formal report which I found to be the greatest writing challenge this semester. There were many aspects to consider in addition to the writing portion such as the data, research, and presentation of visuals. Thus, like other courses I have taken in the past, ENGL 301 assignments helped expose my weaknesses and made me aware of my strengths:

Strengths
Being an English Literature major has allowed me to build a versatile skill set developed by having worked with a variety of literature. I have gained the ability to engage with a text and provide an orderly response, and this course served to demonstrate the strengths that currently exist in my writing and communication. More specifically, I found that I was able to exert my organizational skills well in my writing. It is highly important to have a clear, coherent, and structured document to make it easier for readers to understand, and thus, writing professional emails, memorandums, and letters was a task that I found fairly simple to follow. Moreover, this course allowed me to improve and become well-versed in the re-writes and self-edits that come with re-evaluating one’s work, no matter how small the task was.

Weaknesses
Receiving feedback from both my peers and the professor made it easier to identify my weaknesses: they highlighted writing habits and mistakes that I would have otherwise overlooked in my assignments. Despite the efforts to comply with the You-Attitude writing technique, I still used the negative much too often in my writing—specifically in the surveys designed for my formal report. I found myself to be extra careful in the assignments following. However, I acknowledge that it takes time for a new habit to stick and am confident that with extra practice, it will become an intrinsic approach to my technical writing.

My main weakness was that I focused too much on the finer details of some assignments; consequently, this occasionally affected my ability to stay on schedule which was a critical skill to have in this course. This was highly noticeable when I struggled to follow the timeline I made for my formal report, causing me to rush some sections and possibly led to overlooking mistakes that could have been avoided. While this is a weakness, I do think seeking perfectionism can also be considered a strength as it shows that I strive to create top-quality assignments.

Skills & Future
As a technical writing course, ENGL 301 allowed us to exercise the practical skills needed to write formal documents for professional settings. I am still and will continue to improve on incorporating the concept of the You-Attitude in future emails, cover letters, and business documents. Additionally, writing the application package and completing a web folio were two assignments that were increasingly helpful in starting to search for job opportunities. They taught me the importance of establishing a foundation for your personal branding and having a professional online presence that showcases your expertise and credibility.

Time management and working in a group environment were two other skills that were a learning process.  Firstly, this course motivated me to be more productive, efficient, and meet deadlines all while in a self-learning environment. Time management is a skill I will apply in the workplace and in future learning experiences as I learned how to stick to a schedule in order to avoid falling behind. Moreover, it was a useful experience to work with other students registered in the class as we were able to receive outside input on our work while simultaneously providing feedback to others.

Conclusively, this technical writing course provided me with the practicality of improving written communication techniques; and though I am not positive about the direction I am headed after graduation, I believe that my newly learned skills will prove useful and can only advance my career opportunities. ENGL 301 is just the beginning and I plan on continuing to practice the art of technical writing and master the skills required to write and communicate effectively.

Unit 4.3 of ENGL 301 entailed the creation of a Web Folio and highlighted the importance of increasing visibility and presence online. This allowed me to review past works I have completed throughout the course and encouraged me to self-edit and revise some of the assignments. By doing so, I was able to apply the overall skills I’ve learned in this course. For example, in the definitions assignment peer review, I revised my feedback to follow the You-Attitude writing and changed imperative verbs  “-ing” verbs to be more concise and professional; I also made sure to stay in the present tense to improve my tone. Since I wasn’t able to fully incorporate the You-Attitude in some of the articles written at the beginning of the course, this was a chance to demonstrate this technique.

One thing I learned in the process of creating a Web Folio was the importance of what works I present and how I present them. Since my website caters to my professional goals in the marketing field, I designed pages with texts that highlight my marketable skills relevant to content strategy and UX writing; I want to provide potential employers a glimpse of my technical writing, communication, and design skills by making the reader’s experience as engaging and easy as possible. Incorporating a design that both highlights my relevant skills to my career choice and remains visually appealing throughout was a new and enjoyable process as I did not anticipate designing a webpage before enrolling in this course.

As I had never written a formal report, this assignment was a new writing challenge for me. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring a topic that had real-life implications from my current workplace, C Market Coffee. This report allowed me to address concerns about employee burnout in a formal manner; and since I have been employed there for over three years now, the research portion for this assignment was fairly simple as I am highly familiar with the café’s operations and was able to gather the information I needed from my co-workers. However, one thing I underestimated was the survey portion of my research—I found it quite difficult to build an efficient survey that would help me gather the information I needed. Admittingly, I struggled a lot with finding questions that would avoid the negative yet still address employee burnout. I quickly realized that my own experience as a staff member should not dictate how the questions were asked because that could make a participant reflect on personal issues; instead, I simply needed to set a clear objective for each survey in order to avoid asking any aimless or inappropriate questions.

Another challenge I faced—and am still facing—is in my data section. More specifically, I need to find how to interpret the data I collected in an effective manner, and make sure I consider all the factors that could potentially limit the validity of my proposed solutions. With that being said, I plan to include more data about the success of compensation practices and the retention strategies used by other companies with hopes of increasing the persuasiveness of my report. This is particularly important because C Market Coffee is a small business with a limited budget, meaning that the more expensive, long-term recommendations have to be presented to be most beneficial to the company.

Similar to the previous units, this peer review process was helpful—and perhaps the most interesting. For this unit, I was assigned to peer review Matilda’s “A Casual Analysis and Feasibility Report on Attracting Customers to The Kings Arms.” Learning about the “You” writing attitude in an earlier assignment made me become a lot more conscious about how I deliver my feedback; this is a writing style I have come to genuinely enjoy and I hope those who receive my peer reviews are positively benefiting from this new writing style as well.

I found the peer review I received from Ethan was very helpful and he definitely pointed out errors that I otherwise would not have noticed such as missing elements in my existing graphs or lacking statement sentences that would clarify the purpose of each section. I have only edited the introduction section of my formal report in accordance with Ethan’s feedback so far, but I am looking forward to implementing more of his peer review into my work and finalizing my report.

 

Formal-Report-DE-2

LinkedIn Research Process

Before this course, I was very unfamiliar with LinkedIn and how it functions—I had only briefly heard of it through friends and peers who have started to look for jobs in their desired fields. With that being said, researching best practices for professional networking on LinkedIn proved a useful and informative assignment. I don’t oftentimes conduct self-led learning, so this part of Unit 2 was a good way for me to begin to do so. Not only did I enjoy researching LinkedIn in detail about something I had only swiftly heard about a handful of times, but I found it to be an effective way of learning how to make note of what is worth noting, and what could be left out. It was interesting to see the differences between what each of us included in our research memorandum such as what my peers had included in the research that I had either not considered or not come across.

I have always been hesitant on posting about myself on a social media platform which is a reason that plays into why I have not been motivated to make a LinkedIn profile. However, researching and learning about the practices and benefits of “putting yourself out there” in a professional sense has made me realize that it is a vital step in networking and connecting with other like-minded people—similar to how we had to form our writing teams at the start of the term. I am excited to develop a profile and highlight skillsets and experience in ways that will help me work towards my professional goals.

Formal Report: Proposal and Outline Processes

For the Formal Report, I chose a topic that I am currently deeply involved with—combating employee burnout and staffing shortage at a local café, C Market Coffee. The planning and research process became a crucial step for me to understand what is expected and required for this assignment; writing the proposal and the outline allowed me to address the steps I need to bring all the elements of my research together while making sure I keep my research narrow and focused. It has also been interesting learning how to place a high value on the intended audience and always write with the reader in mind. Lastly, I am grateful for having created a writing schedule and research plan going forward as major changes cannot be made suddenly.

Peer Review Process

This was an insightful step for Unit 2 and it motivated me to reconsider elements of the formal report proposal that will benefit my final draft. For this unit, I was assigned to peer review Ethan Fung’s proposal in which I mainly focused on providing feedback as clear, direct, and constructive as possible. However, after I received the instructor’s feedback on my peer review, I realized that my attempts at being clear had resulted in a lack of detail. For example, I would describe the reviewed document as “easy to read” and “the main problem” is clear—which are extremely vague and unserviceable ways of describing someone’s work. I learned that details are central to writing a peer review as you want to present your feedback in the most beneficial of ways possible while demonstrating that you genuinely read and understood your peer’s document. I also learned that there is always room for improvement—my peer’s proposal was highly well-organized and expressed; and at first, I had a hard time finding any significant mistakes. Admittingly, I had to read it multiple times in order to gain enough points to write a full review; I hope that my feedback was as useful to my peer as the one I received was to me.

 

MM Peer Review of Proposal for Danae

DE Formal Report Proposal Revised

First Draft of the Technical Definition

Assignment 1.3 of ENGL 301 aimed to practice writing techniques for both definitions and peer reviews. The task was to write a technical definition of a term related to students’ discipline or profession while targeting an audience of non-technical readers. As an English Literature student, I have learned how to write effectively and execute solid research—two skills that I found increasingly helpful for this assignment; however, I oftentimes found myself falling into literary writing habits rather than the required technical approach. Since the term Romanticism is from a humanities discipline that relates to creative expression, it was difficult to explain the term in a straightforward manner and present its ideas with conciseness. Setting a situation beforehand helped to contextualize the challenge of explaining Romanticism to an individual that is unfamiliar with the term; this forced me to think about my term through a technical lens. The learning of three different types of definitions that are used to explain a term—such as a parenthetical, sentence, and an expanded definition—was exceedingly useful. This allowed me to limit the wordiness that I tend to exert while writing as there is a set of requirements for each approach. I particularly found the expanded definition beneficial to write because it allowed me to choose how to explore my term in order to maintain clarity and relevance throughout the document. For example, because the term Romanticism is a historical term, using the methods of Etymology and History as expanded definitions were informative ways for a non-technical reader to understand where the term is rooted and developed from. In essence, this assignment provided the opportunity to practice a technical writing manner different from that of my usual writing, and I highly enjoyed the challenge.

Peer Review Process

The assignment was divided into three main stages, with the second consisting of a peer review. After organizing reviews with my writing team, I was assigned to review Juanita Kwok’s draft and provide constructive criticism. While reading my team member’s draft, I focused on editing through a technical writing standpoint which in turn, helped me develop my attention to detail and learn how to catch mistakes in varying contexts such as expression, grammar, organization, and context. Focusing on such elements encouraged me to revisit my own document and review it through a peer review perspective—a process that shed light on critical mistakes I made in my own draft. For example, reading my peer’s parenthetical definition made me realize that I had misunderstood the requirements for this type of definition and thus, I had written this part incorrectly. In addition, I received criticism from another team member who provided me with feedback on my Works Cited, suggesting to include more in-text citations in order to add credibility to my sections about the etymological and historical aspects of the term Romanticism. Moreover, this stage compelled me to be conscious of my use of pronouns while writing the peer review; in retrospect, I was using an excessive amount and had to revise my peer review to diminish the number of pronouns used. With that being said, the peer review process was a critical and interesting part of the assignment: it provided an opportunity to distance myself from my own writing as well as the chance to learn from and assist another student.

Revision Process

Receiving a helpful peer review from Peter encouraged me to consider revising aspects of my draft that I had failed to notice were flawed. Parts of the definitions I wrote were assuming that the audience was familiar with literary terms such as pathetic fallacy and neoclassicism; though, including these terms without explanation was not clear and only confused the reader. This was simple to fix through omission and revision. My team member also gave me considerable positive feedback on voice and clarity which was a confidence boost in my technical writing skills. However, revisiting my draft did expose several grammar mistakes that had slipped my mind which I believe hindered the flow of my writing. After implementing my team member’s feedback and my own self-edits, I mainly concentrated on eliminating filler words in order to strengthen my definitions in clarity and conciseness. Doing so also led to a few revisions on sentence structures and finding a balance between complex and simple sentences. Overall, I really appreciate the way this assignment was divided into the first draft, peer review, and self-editing stages; this process was exceptionally helpful in improving my technical writing skills.

 

Revised Definitions Assignment – Danae Echeverria
Peter’s Review of Danae’s Definitions Assignment